Friday, May 09, 2008

blinkers and indicators

Better Half, Grover and I were waiting to cross the street/road yesterday. BH and I were both annoyed when the oncoming car that was making us wait suddenly turned left instead of passing us. Simultaneously, we made sarky (BrE informal, = sarcastic) comments. The funny thing about our comments was that each of us had accommodated the other's dialect. That is to say, BH used an AmE term and I used BrE:

16 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Is dialect accommodation the definition of true love?

Nah, but it is polite. I (an American) remember one day working with a British woman (in a third, non-English-speaking country). When she asked me for the flashlight, I told her that it was next to the kerosene tin.

mollymooly: the horsey sense of "blinkers" remains at least vestigially in AmE, in expressions like "blinkered vision" and so forth. (Or have I read so many BrE texts that it's part of my dialect, and I'm confusing that with AmE?)

As a BrE speaker, I've got to admit I don't think of 'blinkers' as particularly American. I use the word without sensing any American influence (after all, it's not a word that comes up often in American movies or T.V. programme imports!), and so do many Brits. The COED (11th ed., 2004)does not mark the usage as 'Am.', which it usually does for adopted expressions.